France’s biggest supermarket chain, Carrefour, may have security guards in Brazil that can beat to death a Black customer, but here in France the company has not yet bowed before the country’s ring master of police violence, the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
Its local hypermarket near us still has special shelves offering halal foods and, across the long aisle, kosher. Special, only in the same sense that, if one is out shopping and looking for spices, you know more easily where to find them if there is a spice shelf rather than having to find the cardamom hidden beside the organic eggs and the black pepper tucked behind some washing powder.
Poor Gérald could not possibly stand between them without suffering an attack of apoplexy over the fact that this French business has shelves reserved for what he denounced a month ago as an unacceptable sign of “separatism”. Simple commercial sense from the point of view of its owners who have been steadily extending the shelf space concerned, even as France’s governing politicians have been hard at it stoking the furnace of racism.
